Pay-TV to add subscribers in 2014

January 13, 2014 - 7:17pm

Reports of pay-TV's death have been greatly exaggerated.

While industry analysts have voiced concern over pay-TV's prospects in the last few years as over-the-top and video-on-demand services emerged on the content viewing landscape, it seems clear now that consumers are happy having both. This does come with a caveat, however - consumers want to keep their pay-TV services, which include cable, satellite and telco providers of linear TV, but they also want some of the features of OTT and VOD. Pay-TV operators are thus in a prime position to capitalize on their current infrastructure with a few additional services. Maximizing multichannel distribution potential will be key to future revenue opportunities.

There will be 103.1 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2014, according to Parks Associates projections. The research firm announced its latest findings to coincide with the Consumer Electronics Show, according to Variety. It's a modest upgrade from 102.5 million subscribers in 2013, but also shows that pay-TV will not be taking a significant hit from the arrival of other content distributors.

The survey also found that many consumers want the features of OTT and VOD services on linear TV. These include remote access to DVR content (31 percent of respondents), TV Everywhere (27 percent) and personalized recommendations (26 percent). These are key features of a multidistribution environment and exhibit consumer interest in investing more in pay-TV operators that offer these features. In order to scale their architecture to accommodate the input and output of more file formats and content distribution types, pay-TV operators can invest in a few key technologies, such as video transcoders, that enable them to take their broadcast infrastructure to the next level.